But to fully appreciate Tough Guy, you need to run it. And not in July when they hold a summer version and temperatures are in the pleasant 70s and swimming through the Underwater Tunnel is nothing more than a refreshing dip in the pool. You need to run it in January, when the weather can be so cold the first competitors occasionally scrape some flesh off their legs as they break through the ice on the water hazards. You need to run the opening 6-mile cross country portion, haul your body up and down, up and down, up and down the hillside Slalom, climb over and into and out of the 7-foot-high cement containers of knee-deep horse manure in the Elephant Graveyard, wade, crawl, slip and slide through the series of waist-deep trenches of mud that make up the Ghurka Grand National, climb the nets to the top of 30-foot twin pyramids in the Tiger and dash through its tentacles of stinging electric tape.And then you need to pause briefly at the water stop, and look ahead to the remaining 22 obstacles spread over two miles of the Killing Fields. Where the course now gets tough.Just don\'t pause too long because hypothermia is setting in and you don\'t want to spend any longer on the course than necessary or fall any farther behind the other nearly 5,000 competitors.That\'s right. Five thousand runners. And there\'s no prize money. Hell, the entry fees range from $100 to $500. There\'s not even a free T-shirt. All the competitors get for their money and agony is the satisfaction that they have the right stuff to call themselves Tough Guys.If they survive, that is.
